Dr Uttara Shahani (RSC) and Professor Michael Collyer (University of Sussex) have a new article in Social Sciences that highlights how colonial practices of forcible displacement of individuals inform the current agreement between the UK and Rwanda – the 2022 UK-Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership (MEDP). They argue that the MEDP marks a break with the UK’s and other liberal democracies post-1970s migration policies. While there are some international parallels, such as Australia’s ‘Pacific Solution’ of ‘offshoring’ asylum, a much clearer precedent involving the forcible movement of people to countries where they have no personal or legal connection existed for many years in the British Empire. Colonial policies of forcible removal, relocation, displacement, and dispersal around the Empire are well established. The authors draw attention to these longer histories before investigating more recent cases of the dispersal of refugees within the British Empire in the twentieth century.
Read the article online: Offshoring Refugees: Colonial Echoes of the UK-Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership